(This post is an updated version of one I originally wrote in 2011 for AmeriCollector, the previous incarnation of Northwest Collector, titled “eBay: The Thin Line Between Love and Hate.” It contained two lists: “Seven Things I LOVE About eBay” and “Seven Things I HATE About eBay.” Many of my complaints back then are no longer valid today, like “The word count for feedback is too low” and “It’s a pain in the butt to sift through 16 pages of feedback to find the negatives and neutrals.” I’m now up to eight things I love about eBay and down to five things I hate about it. It reminds me of advice columnist Ann Landers’s advice to women complaining about their mates: “Are you better off with him or without him?” With that in mind, I regard eBay like a partner who is chronically late or forgets to fill your car’s gas tank until the fuel gauge is at “E”: I’m irritated at times but not enough to leave.)

I’ve been buying on eBay since 2001 and selling there since roughly 2011. Since I hadn’t sold much at that point, my likes and dislikes were written from the perspective of a buyer only. In some ways it’s changed, for better or for worse, as anyone whose been bidding or buying on eBay that long can tell you. No surprise there.

Anyway, here are . . .

Eight Things I LOVE About eBay

1. It’s the world’s largest flea market. Virtually EVERYTHING shows up there sooner or later. If you’re patient and experiment with key words, you can find some great stuff at incredible prices just because other eBayers miss them.

2. Entrepreneurs of all types can sell online and even make a living without having websites of their own. eBay is the embodiment of cyber-capitalism. I predict that e-commerce will achieve in this century what America and Pamela Anderson couldn’t in the last: the destruction of communism, once and for all.

3. It’s a great place to meet people with the same interests. I’ve met a number of people—both buyers and sellers—on eBay who are experts in their collecting areas. They’ve been great sources of information, and I’ve reciprocated by keeping their wanted items in mind and sending them links whenever I come across something of possible interest. Camaraderie

4. The countdown feature is a big improvement. eBay used to discourage sniping, which was silly. Now they facilitate it: You no longer have to refresh the page to time your bid.

5. The rating system gives a decent idea of the kind of seller you’re dealing with. I’ve run into a few idiots and several cheapskates—people who charged for Priority Mail shipping, then sent the item by media mail—but after well over 1,000 purchases I’ve never really been ripped off by anyone. (Paying with PayPal helps.)

6. The “Watch This Item” feature is a big help. Ditto for “Buy It Now or Best Offer”—although you could always make an offer just by messaging the seller. And now, if you “watch” an item—or even just view it—a dealer may offer you a discount, and you can make a counteroffer. Unless I’m afraid that someone else will snap an item up, I always “watch” it first and wait to see if the seller voluntarily lowers the price.

7. You can collect without leaving the house. Sure, that can be bad for old-school collectibles dealers who like in-person transactions, but let’s be honest: More often than not, those same dealers buy and sell on eBay themselves—and even buy items on eBay and relist them there. (Possibly, Covid has also affected buying habits, but it should no longer do so.) eBay is really no different from any other auctioneer that allows absentee bidding; they just do it online, on a much larger scale.

8. eBay has increased the number of characters for feedback. It used to be 80—not nearly enough to blast a bad seller. Now it’s 500 characters. Have at it!

Five Things I HATE About eBay

1. eBay takes a big bite in seller’s fees. According to AI Overview, this is a top buyer complaint. eBay’s final value fees for most items in 2011 (again, according to AI Overview) were about 10 percent plus a 2.9 percent PayPal processing fee and another $0.30 per transaction, so 12.9 percent and change. When I sold a photo for $250 last month, I had to pay a transaction fee of $38.14, or 15.3 percent—not huge increase in 15 years, but enough to make me get serious about selling through Northwest Collector instead. (Check us out in a month or so.)

2. eBay lets sellers cancel auctions after you’ve bid—and doesn’t let you leave bad feedback. I complained about this in my August 1 post. I get it that people make mistakes. But wasting people’s time because you don’t bother to proofread your own listing, then cancel the listing the day before the auction is due to end, really sucks—especially when it seemed clear that the seller expected wild bidding and didn’t get it. I had bid $9.99 and may have won it for that. The seller said he intended to make the starting bid $99.99. The upshot: The item is still listed—at $49.99 or best offer, with two watchers. (I’m not one of them.) Good luck, jerkoff.

3. The “Saved Feed” option means you have to wade through loads of garbage-filled emails every day. I don’t know whether it’s because sellers use a lot of irrelevant key words (which used to be against eBay rules) or if it’s eBay’s algorithm, but it’s irritating. I get plenty of junk from USPS already; I don’t need it from eBay.

4. I attempted to snipe an item and eBay did not accept my bid. It was about six seconds before the auction ended. I was plenty pissed off when it happened: It was something I really wanted and I bid high on it (over $1,200); it sold for, like, $150. Fortunately, it went to an eBay friend (see #3 under “Eight Things I LOVE About eBay”), so I don’t feel too bad about it, but I still don’t know what the problem was. It never happened to me before.

5. The system of encrypting bidders’ names sucks. I griped about this in 2011. Under the old system, when people’s eBay “handles” were shown, along with the number of their transactions, I learned the bidding habits of folks I regularly bid against: Some would bid high; some wouldn’t. Some would bid in huge chunks; others would bid in little increments, like old biddies (no pun intended) at a high-stakes Vegas Pai Gow table. Some were even professional collectibles dealers who wouldn’t bid beyond a certain point if they couldn’t resell the item at a reasonable profit. This was valuable knowledge that enabled me to bid effectively. Nowadays it’s anonymous, with names like “t***1,” although you can still see how many eBay transactions they’ve made. eBay claims this is to protect bidders’ privacy, but it’s really because you could message them directly, which eBay of course wanted to stop. And now sellers can mask even coded bidders’ names and the numbers of their transactions. Not nearly as much fun as bidding against missfit and whitezombie . . .

Today I am totally pissed off: I made the opening bid of $9.99 on an item six days ago. The auction was due to end tomorrow. I was the only watcher.

Then, this morning, the seller canceled the auction, citing an error in the listing. When I messaged him through eBay, he replied: I meant to start it off at $99.99 and did not realize my mistake until just now. I paid way more than the $9.99 I had accidently [sic] started it at.

I messaged him back: You waited until the day before the auction ended to do that?

His reply: Quote “did not realize my mistake until just now.”

Me: You got only one bid (me) and one watcher (me), and you think you’ll get $99 for it? Good luck. And you’re totally unapologetic. Great eBayer.

Him: I will bet anything that if you had listed either of your two item [sic] for $2 instead of $200 or whatever as buy it nows, and someone had won it for $2.00, you would have cancelled the auction. And yes I do. Everyone is not always on at the same time.

Me: If you had canceled the item 5 days ago and apologized, I would have understood. But every seller checks the bidding on his items. And they start low to attract more bids with “no reserve” [per the listing]. More likely you expected more people to bid and weren’t happy with it, so you weren’t taking chances. And I wouldn’t have made the error of listing a $200 for $2. That would be careless and unprofessional. Like listing a $99 item for $9.99 and then canceling the day before the auction was due to end.

Him: ok 1572 feedback [mine] compared to 21988 [his]. You win and I have over 900 items listed and sorry that I just noticed one not listed correctly. You have had your say. Are you hoping I will say, here you can have it for $9.99? Too bad!

(Note: All of his other 900+ listings are “Buy it now or best offer.”)

Me: No, I don’t expect to get it for $9.99, and I wouldn’t want it at this point anyway—and I couldn’t care less about your feedback. You could have been more professional about canceling the listing.

Him: yes it gives you so may [sic] options….nope

Me: I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean. And the fact that all your other listings are “buy it now or best offer” also suggests you expected a lot of bidding on this item. Or did you “mistakenly” list it as an auction in addition to the $9.99 starting bid? You’ve wasted enough of my time. Have a great day!

I would have said a lot more, but eBay has a rule about abusive language.

When I tried to complain to eBay, their irritating chatbot informed me: The seller ending the auction early is generally discouraged but can happen. If the seller ended the auction due to an error in the starting price, this is within their discretion.

Which begs the question, as I suggested above: What’s to stop a seller from ending an auction at the last minute just because he feels the bidding is not getting as high as he hoped?

This actually reminds me of a painting that some brain-dead seller in New Zealand listed with a $99 starting bid many years ago. I asked him if he would consider selling it for $150 on “Buy it now.” He said, Oh, no, it’s worth much more than that. So I bid and, predictably, won the painting for $99. Then . . . no reply from the seller. No request for payment. Nothing about shipping. Dead silence, despite multiple polite emails from me asking how much to pay. Needless to say, I never got the painting.

It was the first of only two scathing feedbacks I’ve ever left on eBay.

The second time was when I purchased a historical letter from some nut in Germany. That time I did pay, then waited to receive the letter. It never arrived. I got eBay involved and PayPal refunded my money. When I sent a nasty message to the seller about listing an item, accepting payment, and then not sending the goods, he replied, “Why are you angry? You got your money back and I got to keep my letter!” Certifiable loon.

What’s to stop a seller from ending an auction at the last minute just because he feels the bidding is not getting as high as he hoped?

Long story short, eBay really needs to protect bidders/buyers more:

(1) Sellers should have a deadline—like, five days before an auction is due to end—after which they can’t cancel the auction if someone has already left a bid. You can’t invite bidders to bid in your auction and then end it because the bidding isn’t as crazy as you hoped. Professional (by which I mean ethical) auction houses don’t do that, nor should eBay. And it does waste buyers’ time to bid and plan to up their bids—only to learn that the seller has weaseled out.

(2) Given that, under current eBay rules, sellers can cancel an auction after someone has already bid, ostensibly due to an error in the starting price, they should be penalized for that. It’s their responsibility to proofread their own listings. You don’t get a pass for being lazy or careless.

(3) If a seller does cancel an auction after someone has bid, the bidder should be able to leave negative feedback. The fact that bidders have no recourse when a seller is careless or acts in bad faith is really enraging. eBay should do more to ensure the integrity of its auctions, and that means establishing rules that allow mistakes to be corrected within a reasonable amount of time but not allow a loophole for sellers to game the system. Every auction without a reserve is effectively a gamble: You may have a treasure that gets a lot of high bids, or you may get one bid. If a seller doesn’t want to run that risk, there’s “Buy it now or make an offer.” That’s what it’s for: a straight purchase.

About 15 years ago I wrote a story about seven things I love about eBay and seven things I hate about it. I think it’s time to revisit that.